This is where they’d started their family, when it was their home.
sentiment
What was left
What was left in Charlotte’s bowl wasn’t worth saving. But I ate it on principle, so it wouldn’t go to waste. And there was an analogy in that, to going back to my hometown for our annual visit, gumming the… Read More ›
Regret
I imagined the house quiet, after they’d left. I could hear the memory of their voices as they were now, an echo. I could feel my heart pull in the way a hand contracts to a fist, the way a… Read More ›
Weights
At this time of day, this time of year, the butterfly glows gold in the window of our den it’s hung by chains, framed, with dust in the old border and cobwebs strung to the window’s edge the butterfly is… Read More ›
November 22, 2018 (Thanksgiving). I went back in time to the chauffeur’s flat, that place we stayed in a remote corner of Scotland one Thanksgiving, unlike any other. Near some small, port town on the coast by the ferries over… Read More ›
Poem | ‘The remains’
How dim the light in the morning through the last brown leaves And the look of the limbs curled inwards, slumped low How soft the heater blows those long, solemn notes Like the sound of a car scraping down an… Read More ›
‘Wax and wane’
By the time we got to the end of October I was done with it. The Halloween decals on the windows, the witches and skulls…it seemed to go on forever, like it should have been over by now. The skeleton… Read More ›
The same deep water as you
We went back to the old elementary school, Charlotte’s last year, for the annual Halloween bash. Dawn and I stood in the playground feeling tired and out of sorts, trying to make out the identities of kids running by as… Read More ›
‘Cuts you up’
Lily (who now goes by Lee) and I drove to the Teanaway river valley on the east side of the Cascades, stopping at a Safeway in the small town of Cle Elum for junk food. I didn’t bring the guts… Read More ›
Near to fall
And so at last it was done, the book of poems I spent all summer with it seemed. They weren’t my poems, but became mine more and more each day. I sat on a chair in the grass and put… Read More ›
